


lay these things bare

by limerental



Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Aging, Crack Treated Seriously, Domestic Fluff, F/M, First Kiss, Getting Together, Hair Loss, Implied/Referenced Character Death, no one dies in this fic tho
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-24
Updated: 2020-08-24
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:07:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26085412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/limerental/pseuds/limerental
Summary: “Do you see this,” the bard had squawked, flattening back his fringe and pointing, his eyes bulging from his face and lips pursed tight in between bouts of flapping. “It’s getting worse by the day, Yennefer. I live in the public eye. I am meant to age gracefully, Yennefer! My livelihood will live and die by the appeal of my youthful, good looks.”“How has it not kicked the bucket yet, then?” she drawled. “You haven’t been good-looking the whole time I’ve known you.”Jaskier comes to Yennefer to solve a pressing issue.Yennefer can't help herself from having a bit of fun. Until it's not really all that fun anymore.Aka Jaskier goes bald and Yen has a crisis and it's somehow very very tender idk
Relationships: Jaskier | Dandelion/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Comments: 16
Kudos: 148





	lay these things bare

**Author's Note:**

> this is completely ridiculous i'm sorry idk what happened here. also, there are some vague book references here and this Jaskier and Yennefer are more of the book flavor than the netflix flavor but no spoilers.

It all happened, in the ridiculous fashion alarmingly typical of Yennefer’s long life, at the whims of Geralt’s bard’s receding hairline.

“Do you see this,” the bard had squawked, flattening back his fringe and pointing, his eyes bulging from his face and lips pursed tight in between bouts of flapping. “It’s getting worse by the day, Yennefer. I live in the public eye. I am meant to age gracefully, Yennefer! My livelihood will live and die by the appeal of my youthful, good looks.”

“How has it not kicked the bucket yet, then?” she drawled. “You haven’t been good-looking the whole time I’ve known you.”

Jaskier spluttered, letting his messy fringe fall, and pointed an accusatory finger at her instead.

“Oh, you haven’t changed much, have you? Here’s me thinking you still had some sympathy for an old friend. Here’s me thinking you and I had some shared history. Some nostalgia, hmmm? Well, my mistake, Yennefer of Vengerberg, my bloody--”

“I’ll look into it,” she said sharply, sighing in resignation. She knew a few spells and potions offhand that would fix the state of his hairline in a blink, but something vindictive in her longed to make him squirm.

Additionally, she couldn’t quite see what he was so ornery about. His hair had thinned along his crown maybe in the years since the end of the war, but that was to be expected for a man of his-- Come to think of it, she didn’t have the faintest idea how old he was. Time lost most of its meaning for beings such as herself, the scale of human lifetimes outside of her comprehension. It had been perhaps three decades since she met Jaskier and had not paid the passage of time much mind since, but he had to be-- well. By that reckoning, he had to be in his late fifties, perhaps older.

She narrowed her eyes at him. Did he look it? Crow’s feet deepened at the corners of his eyes, his foppish hair had silvered to a mix of grey and chestnut, and he had grown a bit of a paunch.

How old was he? Old enough that he had taken up a permanent position teaching at Oxenfurt and no longer traveled with the Witcher. Yennefer herself had taken up in the same city, opening a shop peddling magical cures and wares and potions to the discerning customer. The shop loomed in a delightfully crooked building on the edge of a canal, the creaking sign outside boasting of all sorts of tricks and remedies to diverse ailments, though it was a rare day to find a customer poking through her wares. Which was just how she liked it.

It was here that he had found her, pacing the little shop as she sprawled with her feet up, tugging nervously at his apparently thinning hair.

How old was he really? Ciri was a woman now, travelling the Continent on her own, and it had been many long years since she and Geralt and Jaskier had travelled beside one another, desperate to keep her safe. The years marched on as they were wont to do, and here was her proof.

Geralt’s bard. Desperate and a little terrified. Batting against this distinct tell of time passing too quickly like a moth against a screen.

He was human. He was as fragile and fleeting as that moth.

How long did he have? How old was he?

Yennefer steepled her fingers and looked over them, regarding the distraught man, pretending that she was considering her mental library of hair growth cures and not his mortality.

“Yes, yes,” she said, “come back next week. I’ll surely have a cure for you then.”

* * *

“Ah, I have just the thing,” she said when he swung by exactly a week later, prompt and early, arriving before she had even swung the little carved sign above her window to _open_.

“A cure!” he crooned, clutching his hands together. “Oh, that’s just wonderful. I’ll have it and be on my way again.”

“Now, now,” she said. “These things take time.”

“How much time? Fall commencement is a week away, and I have to hurry home and prepare my speech. I can’t dither much longer here. I can’t waste another second.”

She had meant not to delay his suffering any longer and deliver him a full head of hair with a flick of her fingers, but well, if her company was such a _waste of time_ then she did not pity him.

She flicked her fingers.

“There,” she said, and though nothing had yet changed, Jaskier patted his hair and hummed, eyes closed in blissful satisfaction. Had he always been so contrived and full of high-flung dramatics or had that come with age? Yennefer could not remember.

“Thank you, darling,” he said, daring to lean and kiss her hand. She snatched her fingers back at once as though burned, and he tutted, blowing her a kiss instead as he flounced out the door.

His chipper demeanor and gratitude almost made her regret what she had done.

Almost.

* * *

“It’s getting _worse_ ,” the idiot shrieked, teary-eyed, weak chin wobbling as he gingerly touched his fading hairline, decidedly more wispy than just the day before. “Yennefer, what’s happened? What’s gone wrong?”

“Oh my,” said Yennefer, forcing her eyes wide in a show of surprise, as though she had not deliberately accelerated his balding in a show of pettiness. “It must be a rare side effect. I must do more research.”

She tugged a book at random off her cluttered shelves and acted as though she aimed to pore through it. Jaskier hovered, biting at his frayed nails, and running his fingers absentmindedly through his hair, staring blankly at the tufts he tugged loose with his errant combing.

She almost regretted her cruel trick for the sheer terror on his pale face, but how long had he lived along the very same river delta and never once paid her a visit except to demand her services? Did the many years of shared camaraderie at Geralt’s side truly mean nothing to him?

Granted, Yennefer had not been in any rush to seek him out despite knowing of his position at Oxenfurt when she set up shop. She had always tolerated the bard when forced to live and travel with him but no more than that. The bond they had shared during the war had been due to the nature of forced proximity, nothing more.

There were plenty of bonds from back then that had waned and faltered. Most friendships were born of circumstance after all. It was natural to grow apart. Even Geralt and Ciri she saw less and less of, and time marched on, and that was just the way of things.

But how old was Jaskier? He was human and fleeting and fading before her eyes. If he had not stepped into her shop to beg for a cure for his thinning hair, she may have allowed him to drift into obscurity. Seen him next on a funeral pyre.

How old was he?

She watched him tug his poor hair out by the roots and glisten with tears and fret horribly, and she did feel a pang of sympathy for him, she truly did. But it also amused and thrilled her, this control over the sands of time.

“I promise you that I will fix it,” she said and flicked her fingers.

It was unkind, she knew. Terribly so. But the world was not kind. This, at least, she could control.

* * *

He arrived the next day wearing a blonde wig curled in tight ringlets, his eyes watery and bloodshot, his mouth curled down.

“ _Why is this happening?_ ” he hissed, and he was all fried nerves and tension and terror.

“Show me,” said Yennefer, putting on a mask of doe-eyed sympathy.

Jaskier grimaced and spun a blond curl around his finger. He looked pathetic and thin and like he wanted nothing more than to turn on his heel and walk right out of the shop. Not to have to reveal what lurked under his wig.

Yennefer did her very best to look appropriately consoling and serious. She almost felt bad for wanting to laugh.

He swept the blond wig from his head, and she did laugh, a quick snort of a thing that she quickly stifled when he looked at her in appalled and wretched misery.

His head shone in the gleam of the lamplight, perfectly and utterly bald, as smooth and shiny as a pebble on the banks of the Pontar, as round and supple as an egg.

“Yennefer,” he squeaked at a distressing pitch, her eardrums protesting, “you said you could fix this. You have _made it worse_. In stupendous fashion.”

“Yes, I see that,” said Yennefer. “Have you considered that it wasn’t my fault?”

“Yennefer! I am hairless! I am as smooth as a newborn baby’s bottom! I am-- how could this be anything but your fault?” he raged, worrying the blonde wig in his hands.

“You don’t know a thing about magic, bard,” said Yennefer crossly. “Who says it’s my fault? Maybe you have a magic resistant constitution. Maybe your hair was simply meant to fall out. Maybe you’re the object of a curse. How do you know I’m to blame?”

Even knowing that she absolutely was unequivocally to blame, his accusations riled her. How dare he! How dare he assume that she was incompetent! She was far from it. Malevolent and petty, occasionally, but far from incompetent.

“Fuck,” Jaskier breathed, muttering a number of other more diverse curse words under his breath and looking dangerously close to fainting to the dusty floor of her little shop. He looked pitiful and mournful and utterly miserable, and she would have been tricked into feeling very sorry for him if she did not already know this was a simple issue of vanity.

So his pretty, boyish locks had fallen out, so what? What was a bit of hair loss compared to the suffering of thousands of others across this Continent? This man lived comfortably in a posh little apartment in the good part of town, working a stable job unlikely to get him killed, rubbing elbows with the rich and powerful as he taught their children scales, and then had the audacity to act as though he were attending his own funeral over a smidgen of hair loss.

Yennefer had been most generous. She could have spelled the hair off of every inch of his body! She could have left him smooth and pelt-free! He should be thanking her, should be sobbing in gratitude rather than distress. He still had his pretty, long eyelashes and his creeping expanse of body hair, after all.

“Yennefer, can you fix it?” he whined. “I can’t be seen like this. I can’t face my fellows at the Academy like this. I will never have sex _again_.”

And she almost said something like _if the only bedfellows you can find give more a shit about your hair than about you, then you shouldn’t be fucking them_ , but realized a blink before the words left her mouth how motherly and trite and utterly boring that would sound.

Yennefer schooled her features into something very serious and aggressively determined.

“Jaskier, look at me,” she said, and he did. To his credit, he made a momentous effort to pull himself back from the brink of tears, wobbling only a little here and there as he met her eyes. His slightly damp eyelashes really were quite long and pretty. His bald head caught the light just so. “I will fix this. Whatever it takes.”

Yennefer made the mistake of leaning to serenely pat his hand, and then the waterworks really began in force.

She sighed incredibly deeply and offered him a handkerchief and then a glass of water. She could have kicked him out the moment he started snotting up, but it was a little bit her fault anyhow.

She sighed even more deeply still and bought him an elderberry pastry from the bakery next door and brewed a pot of tea in her room upstairs and tossed a quilt over him and sat there with his bald head in her lap just _pat-pat-pating_ the naked skin from time to time like she had any sort of clue how to comfort a human being.

Things had been different many years ago, when the world was full of danger at every turn, when they had spent a winter together in Kaer Morhen and a long spring on the road. And then the war and the coup and endless days of travel in a ridiculous mess of a company. In those days, she could have said something like _we have to carry on. No matter the cost._ And now, the evils they had fought against were vanished or smoothed over, but the world was still a little bit wretched and what now were they carrying on to? What was the cost?

How old was the man who sniffled into a fitful sleep in her lap? She had not once seen Jaskier cry like this in the old days, but then, she had not often spared him more than a glance. He was a drunk and a philanderer and a nuisance and more than a bit of a cock, and it had not been worth her time to look at him unless fishing him out of trouble. And even then, she looked at him in a similar manner that she would scrutinize an insect under her heel.

She looked now, his face more youthful in sleep and familiar in the way that old acquaintances’ faces were always oddly familiar, pressed into the background of her memories.

She did not know how old he was. She did not know if she wanted to know.

* * *

Jaskier remained quite bald.

Though Yennefer told him that daily visits simply were not necessary in their valiant quest to find a cure, he showed up bright and early each day with a bag of croissants from the market or a bottle of Est Est or some other indulgence that Yennefer could not just turn away.

“Bright and early” seemed a rather subjective period of time for the man, but he always showed up, donning increasingly elaborate wigs and colorful, feathered hats.

Yennefer would have been cross and ornery about his presence except that most days she didn’t have much else going on. Most of her contracts and transactions were long distance, and most of her workings were able to unfold in the background as she did other things.

Other things somehow became sitting down for tea with Geralt’s bard at her rarely-used dining table as he laid out scones on her mismatched crockery and tutted over the state of her apartment.

“There’s no art!” he moaned, gesturing at the barren walls and utilitarian furnishings.

“There’s plenty of art,” she said, gesturing in turn at her fully-stocked bookshelves and various mysterious objects of a magical nature, bones and crystals and iron nails and silver pentacles. “This is the art of my craft. Unfortunately, you are too small-minded to understand.”

“But where’s the color? Where’s the pizazz?” He picked up a mummified finger that rested on a nearby shelf and promptly dropped it back with a whimper when he recognized what it was. “This place is dismal! It’s like a crypt!”

“Pizazz is for the circus,” said Yennefer, wincing at having been made to say such a word. “In other words, your lodgings, I assume.”

Jaskier hissed in delightfully offended dramatics, and Yennefer ignored his squawking and groaning to settle in for tea, secretly pleased at how easily she could rile him.

They had tea and scones and Jaskier spoke about color theory in grand tones and scattered crumbs on the floor that the cat lapped up and Yennefer hummed at appropriate moments and interjected her own opinions at inappropriate ones. Eventually, she poked and prodded and made appraising noises over his shiny, bald head and promised she would work most swiftly to find a solution to his issue.

Then, Jaskier inevitably uncorked his bottle of wine, and they sat out together on the balcony that looked over the canal as the sun set over the city. The cat tucked into Jaskier’s lap as he swung his wine glass precariously in his hand to recount stories of their shared past. Of Geralt and Ciri and the hansa and the road. Of the monsters and the scenery and the cuisine and the old friends long lost or buried.

“Yes, yes, I remember,” Yennefer said after each burst of reminiscing, though the memories felt different when told by the bard. Maybe they truly had happened like that for him, maybe to be human and powerless was to feel things more powerfully and more painfully and more brightly or maybe he was simply a master of embellishment and hyperbole and added color and vigor without even realizing.

She did not think their days travelling with the company had been quite so full of cheery song or the nights in Kaer Morhen so full of laughter. She remembered a fair bit of distress and cold and desperate fear. She remembered Geralt’s grim, wan face and his worry over the child, his gusting breaths when he tucked his face into her shoulder, all lank, white hair hanging in greasy tangles and barely-restrained sobs. She remembered the blood and the pain and the hunger. The gaggles of refugees and the stampede of horses and the endless, dusty march.

“Do you remember, Yen?” he asked, leaning towards her, goblet sloshing and eyes glazed as he looked out at the crimson flush of the horizon. Many of those that they had ridden with in those days were dead. The world was simpler now and stranger to navigate and there would come a time when the things she had lived were told as history and not fond memory. That time was coming nearer and nearer.

“Yes,” she said and looked at him while he looked at the sunset. He was smiling strangely, wistfully, lost in memories that she was not privy to but that maybe he would share one day. Maybe tomorrow.

 _How old is he?_ she thought and touched his hand.

He shuffled close to lean against her shoulder.

* * *

After a handful of weeks, Yennefer’s plausible deniability dwindled, and she finally had to admit the terrible, horrible truth to herself.

She enjoyed the bard’s company.

She liked that he knew her favorite flavor of pastry and brought her new and exotic teas from visiting merchants and had impeccable taste in wine and spirits. She liked to niggle at him until he scoffed and crooned, and she endeavored to elicit as many exaggerated reactions and objections as possible on any given day. His theatrics and impassioned debates were often entertaining in their spiraling enthusiasm, and she laughed with increasing good humor over the spectacle.

And though she was truly laughing at him rather than with him, sometimes, he looked at her after a particular bout of dramatic spluttering and grinned with flushed pleasure to see her folded in half and wheezing, sometimes cackling like a proper village witch.

And Jaskier was good to look at when he was pink-cheeked and grinning, crow’s feet tight with wrinkles and blue eyes twinkling with mirth. He looked good even for the guffaws brayed at a disturbing volume and copious knee slapping and the atrocious wigs sitting askew on his head. Yennefer didn’t know if she found him attractive or just familiar. She had known him too long.

She enjoyed knowing him.

And by then, there was an even more terrible, horrible truth to be confronted.

If she flicked her fingers and restored his hair to the full and lush locks of his prime, would he thank her graciously and disappear again into their shared city and promise to meet up soon and then never return? Would he become occupied with his scholarly duties and no longer drink Est Est with her on the balcony and no longer bring over a fresh bundle of croissants with strawberry preserves and soft cheese and no longer look at her with a sweet and mournful smile as he recounted their shared memories?

Would these moments too one day fade into the grey annals of things Yennefer forgot? She barely remembered the warm nights in Kaer Morhen or the sunny days on the road. But she was beginning to, one nostalgic retelling at a time. She looked at the barren, grey rooms over her crooked shop and thought _perhaps some art, perhaps some color_.

Would anyone even think to invite her to his funeral?

How old was he? How old was he?

With a fresh and resolute determination, Yennefer began the complicated work of a much more intricate solution to Jaskier’s affliction. He need not know how she had dallied. He need not know what she had done and would do. She would not tell him of her fears or her fondness.

He did not need to know.

* * *

On the morning that Yennefer completed her working, Jaskier burst into the shop juggling a wedge of cheese and a dusty bottle and a parcel of elderberry pastries. He wore a maroon feathered cap with dangling, gold trappings over a wig of flowing, blonde ringlets. He grinned at her and leaned to kiss her cheek, and she sat up straight and prim, her hands folded in her lap.

“It’s ready,” said Yennefer with a restrained solemnity and watched the way his mouth curved into an ‘o’ and his eyes gleamed and knew this surely was the right decision.

He followed her eagerly up the stairs to her rooms and deposited the cheese and pastries and bottle of wine on her dining table and sat with minimal fidgeting as she prodded one last time at his smooth pebble of a bald head.

She flitted into the back room and emerged with a shimmering potion, flecks of gold and silver catching the light that streamed through her kitchen window, and he eyed it hungrily and looked between it and her with a blatant giddiness.

“Oh! You’ve outdone yourself,” said Jaskier, holding the little bottle in both hands. “It really is an art form, isn’t it? Oh, I’ve never seen anything more stunning.”

“Quit yammering and drink the thing,” said Yennefer, and he lifted it to his lips. He paused a moment with the rim of the bottle against his lips, considering.

“Will there be side effects?” he asked, and she almost laughed out loud, settling for the twitch of an encouraging smile.

“Possibly,” she said and nothing more, and with a shrug, the bard downed the whole potion in one go, head tipped back and throat bobbing. He settled the empty glass vial onto the table and wiped the back of his mouth and settled in to wait.

The two of them waited together, their breath settling into the same cadence, dust motes flickering in the light through the window, facing one another and simply looking.

Suddenly, Jaskier squawked as chestnut hair burst from the bald plane of his head, lengthening into loose waves. He leapt for the gilded, floor-length mirror on the opposite wall and began to preen and flirt and coo, ruffling his freshly-returned hair and making obscene kissy faces.

To Yennefer, it looked just the same as it had when he first flounced into her shop. Thinner around the temples than it had been as a younger man and streaked with faint frosts of grey, but Jaskier exclaimed loudly that he was cured, he was a new man, he was indebted to her for all time, _oh Yennefer, oh do you see how it catches the light? Do you see how it frames my face? Oh Yennefer._

And yes, she saw and told him so, though she did not tell him that she had thought him good to look at without a lick of hair on his scalp and thought the same now. He was good to look at.

“Oh Yennefer,” he moaned and grinned and clapped his hands, and here was where she expected him to dive for the stairs and be gone, in a rush to be on his way and return to his ordinary routine. He had missed weeks of his usual social interactions and had not dared to spend much time in public in his wigs and hats for fear of his secret being revealed. He had been antsy and restless and flighty and anxious, and she expected him to dash away in a blur with one last holler of thanks and no more.

Instead, he walked to the table and uncorked the wine and poured out a glass for the both of them. He unwrapped the pastries and arranged them on her mismatched crockery. He sat cross-legged in one of her dining chairs and looked at her and smiled like the sun.

“Yennefer,” he said with a gesture of invitation. She sat beside him and took a pull of her poured wine.

“Not a bad vintage,” she said for want of something to say, and Jaskier was still looking at her strangely, soft around the edges, focused. She expected him to rush away at any moment. She expected that this may be their very last time drinking wine and eating pastries together in her utilitarian dining room.

“ _Yennefer_ ,” he said and she looked at him more directly and their eyes met. He was good to look at. She enjoyed sitting next to him and being allowed to look. Jaskier must have seen something strange and embarrassing in her expression in that moment, because he cooed and fussed and pulled her into his arms.

She tucked her face into his neck and pretended that she was not weeping.

That evening, he kissed her on the balcony, flushed crimson by the dying sunlight. The cat stretched across the quilt pulled over their laps. Feathery moths flapped endlessly at the window screens.

In the morning, he would bring her croissants from the market, and she would brew him tea.

* * *

The side effects, which Yennefer had known and designed, were this:

Jaskier lived for many long years and then some looking the same as he had in her kitchen that morning. He no longer limped on his bad hip and no longer ached with arthritis in the morning. His wrinkles never deepened, and his hair took on no more silver.

He did not age another day, at least not for a very long time.

He told her years on that he had known immediately what she had done, namely when he had leapt up to look at himself in the mirror and found his stride pain-free as it had not been in decades.

He had known what she had done but had not known why until he turned and saw her looking at him with something so incredibly sad and resigned in her expression.

And he had wanted nothing more than to ease that sad resignation.

And he had wanted her.

Additional side effects which Yennefer had not anticipated included Jaskier caring for her endlessly, breathlessly, and devotedly for the rest of his many long days, into the twilight of both of their lives, until their memories faded into history, and neither of them remembered anything but laughter.

A side effect perhaps more startling and concerning: that Yennefer loved him just the same.

**Author's Note:**

> bald!jaskier: i'm not going bald i'm getting more head!!!  
> yennefer: *immediately returns his hair*
> 
> ..... find me on tumblr @limerental


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